As we’ve seen repeatedly over the past few weeks, there’s a constituency out there that wants to see greater differentiation of institutions in terms of research-intensiveness. In the vernacular, this comes across as advocating “teaching institutions” to complement “research institutions,” something which occasionally gets incorporated into government policy as it did in British Columbia vis-à-vis the new universities.

This kind of talk, of course, makes much of the professoriate go bananas. And they fire back with good stuff like Stephen Saideman, did, saying that universities aren’t about research vs. teaching, they’re about research and teaching.

But here’s the thing: do we really think both sides mean the same thing when they use the word “research”?

When professors pull out the “my life as a scholar means nothing without research” line, they aren’t necessarily trying to say they all need large research budgets and hordes of grad students and tri-council grants or their lives will be meaningless (well, some might be saying that, but they’re a minority). What they are saying is that research as a process of searching for new knowledge or construction of new meaning – which can be done through low-budget activities like editing journals, writing reviews, etc. – is inherent in the notion of being a scholar, and that institutions where the teaching isn’t done by scholarly people aren’t worthy of being allowed to grant degrees. Fair enough.

On the flip side, when governments say “we want teaching-only institutions,” they’re not saying they wish to ban professors from doing scholarly reading or engaging with colleagues at colloquia, etc. No one’s going to tell professors to give back their SSHRC grants or to stop writing articles. What they are saying is (a) that they don’t want to stump up big bucks for research infrastructure and (b) they would prefer a system that more closely resembles the U.S. public university system where at flagship institutions, professors essentially teach two courses a semester but everywhere else, they teach four. Also fair enough – unless one is prepared to argue that every non-flagship U.S. institution isn’t a “real university” because they don’t focus enough on research.

“Research” encompasses a wide variety of activities of varying intensities and time commitments. If we’re going to talk more about the balance between teaching and research, we need to stop making absolute statements about research and start treating the subject with the nuance it deserves.

Man, did last week’s Globe editorial on reforming higher education get the bien pensants’ knickers in a knot, or what?

Constance Adamson of OCUFA took the predictable “everything would be fine if only there was more money” line. Over at Maclean’s, Todd Pettigrew made a passionate defence of research and teaching being inextricably entwined, largely echoing a piece from the previous week by McGill’s Stephen Saideman, who argued that universities aren’t teaching vs. research but teaching and research.

Methinks some people doth protest too much.

Let’s take it as read that universities are intrinsically about both teaching and research; there’s still an enormous amount of room for discussion about their relative importance. It may be cute to say that choosing between the two is a false dichotomy but in the real world profs make trade-offs: when they increase their research activity, they tend to spend less time teaching. This shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just math.

Unfortunately, obfuscating the trade-offs between research and teaching is a stock in trade of academia. My particular favourite is the old chestnut about research vs. teaching being a false dichotomy because “the best teachers are often the best researchers.” I’m being restrained when I say that this, as an argument, is a bunch of roadapples. As research has consistently shown, the relationship between the two is zero. Being a good researcher has no effect on the likelihood of being a good teacher and vice versa.

Look, there’s lots to quibble with in the Globe editorial, not least of which is the ludicrous insouciance with which it treats the concept of quality measurement. But most of its basic points are factually correct: by and large, parents and taxpayers think the main purpose of universities is to teach undergraduates and prepare them for careers (broadly defined). Canadian academics are, in fact, the most highly paid in the world outside the Ivy League and Saudi Arabia. They are also demonstrably doing less teaching than they used to, ostensibly in order to produce more research.

Anyone who can’t understand why that combination of facts might provoke at least some questioning about value for money really needs to get out more.

One of the sources of miscommunication here is that the seemingly simple term “research” is actually a very contested term which means enormously different things to different people. More on this tomorrow.